


borrowed light

by arbitrarily



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Serial Killers, Alternate Universe - Southern Gothic, Darkest Night Exchange Treat, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Some Very Obvious Sharp Objects Energy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-28
Updated: 2020-09-28
Packaged: 2021-03-06 20:48:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,706
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26495143
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arbitrarily/pseuds/arbitrarily
Summary: The first time Eddie kills somebody it's mostly to see if he can do it.Turns out, he can.
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 12
Kudos: 45
Collections: Darkest Night 2020





	borrowed light

**Author's Note:**

  * For [darlingargents](https://archiveofourown.org/users/darlingargents/gifts).



i.

The first time Eddie kills somebody it’s mostly to see if he can do it.

Turns out, he can.

The first thing Richie learns as self-defense is laughter. At others, more so than himself. The second thing he learns is you can pick at people in other ways than mockery, that some things cut better than a cruel joke. You can make a person bleed just as easily as make them laugh. He can feel good, when he does that. So he picks up a knife and he does.

ii.

Derry, Mississippi is a shit speck on the map that isn’t worth the cost of gas to get there. Even if you’re just traveling through, headed for greener pastures, it’s no good to stop. Nothing worth doing and even less worth looking at. Kids go missing in a place like this, caught in the humidity, the sweat, the dense green overgrowth through the woods that leeches out into the wetlands, dark and dank places you can slip into same as history. Even if they’re still here, even if they grow up—the kids go missing.

The only good thing about Derry is you forget it once you’re gone.

iii.

The first time he and Richie kill together is in the old Neibolt house. The house is barely standing, wood warped from the wet and the elements, the last storm that blew through, hurricane winds up from down in the delta, took the better part of the roof on the southern facing side of the house. Ugly dark birds roost in the rafters now, cawing at each other. He and Richie don’t pay them any mind. Rot’s crept its way through the house along with the stink of mildew and swamp. No color to this place but for the haint blue painted on the ceiling of the listing porch. Keeps the bad spirits out. He and Richie go in. 

They are sixteen and they are bored. That’s what they say, but there’s another word for what they are and what the town of Derry has made them. Hungry.

iv.

There’s something real bad in the guts of him. There’s a shadow on his soul. That’s what Mommy says. Growing up, Mommy used to say, only two things to cure a boy like Eddie. One was the Lord and the second was Mommy’s medicine. Mommy’s medicine was anything and everything, from penicillin to cooking sherry to antifreeze. She liked a broken boy, Eddie knows that now, so he blames her. Blames her for the fact that he likes to break boys, too.

v.

The first time—Eddie wheezes as he falls back from the body. He peels the gloves off his hands, careful as anything. He digs through his pockets, his hands shaking, until his fingers curl around familiar plastic. He takes a pull from his inhaler and then, finally, a full breath in. “Jesus Christ, aw, Jesus fucking Christ,” he says. The body—formerly a detention-prone degenerate whose lone claim to fame was a starting position on varsity despite his status as a sophomore, formerly a smug pain in the ass who called Eddie “Mama’s Boy” before stuffing a jockstrap in Eddie’s forced open mouth after gym class in the fungal-infected boys’ locker room—had not bled. The perks of asphyxiation. Eddie might’ve been shorter than his prey, but he knew what to do. All you need is rope (an abandoned jump rope he found in the detached garage at home, coiled near the shelf with the rat poison and the insecticide and the Weed-B-Gon; he knew intimately the taste and effect of all three), a little bit of arm strength, the element of surprise, and determination. Gravity, oxygen deprivation—they’d do the rest. He stares at the body, waiting for it do something. He feels a hot rush of power when it does nothing.

Eddie’s breathing goes shaky and wrong again later, as he washes his hands. He doesn't look up in the mirror. He washes them until his skin is raw and tender.

The first time with Richie, Eddie lets Richie wipe his hands clean. The body bleeds this time. Eddie snaps at Richie when he forgets to scrub under his nails, at the blood limned there, dark as dirt and just as stubborn.

vi.

You don’t like boys and you certainly don't like men in a place like Derry. Easier, more acceptable, to kill them.

Richie likes boys and Richie goes to the truck stop, up along the edge of Derry township lines, to pick up men. His jeans hang off his skinny hips, his wide jaw jutting out, fluorescent lights above the gas pumps glinting off his glasses, hiding the cruel glee in his eyes. Men who aren’t supposed to like men and definitely aren’t supposed to like boys like that about him, or at least that’s what he tells Eddie, later. He likes to tell Eddie about how he made them go. _Made them go_ is a kinder way of saying _killed_ and Eddie hates that. Tastes like Mommy’s medicine going down: sweet, the poison disguised. Richie kills those men, and he likes it. He likes it messy. He likes Eddie. He gives Eddie the play-by-play, makes him feel like he was there too, with him. And in its own way, streaked with the blood and the grime and the hate that seeds from a place as rotten and fucked as Derry, it is a kind of love.

vii.

Richie’s tongue is pink. Pink and anatomical, the same as stomach lining or a limp cock; pink like the blood you spit into the sink after the medicine doesn’t take right; pink like a Valentine. An electric shock skips down Eddie’s spine when he touches his own tongue to Richie’s. The kiss is, he’s sure, by probable objective standards terrible and amateur and embarrassingly desperate, but it makes his pulse thready and his entire body light up. Makes him feel alive the same way he feels when a body yields to him, when he watches Richie make flesh yield to the knife. When life slips away. Sometimes he thinks about that—where all that life they take goes. It’s not inside of him and it’s not in Richie, but it has to go somewhere. Maybe it stays in this town. Maybe it’s there, in between the press of their mouths, trapped like any other secret. But he’s not thinking about that, not now. His tongue is in Richie’s mouth, he is inside of him, and Richie doesn’t yield. He pushes back. He makes Eddie take it, too.

viii.

Richie likes an audience. Richie likes to show off. He likes for Eddie to see.

Richie holds a knife to a stretched throat. Richie is tall for his age, an untold strength in those gangly limbs of his, but he’s out-matched by the victim he's got caught by the hair. Henry Bowers, at their mercy. There’s a deep gout of blood that has already sprung loose like a leak in his left thigh. He can barely hold his weight up. He can’t hide the fear in his eyes. The press of the blade under his jaw keeps him quiet as does the blood pooled around his left foot.

“Hey,” Richie says. “Hey, Eds. Eddie, watch this.” Eddie does.

ix.

Richie doesn’t kill neat. Blood splatters and sprays, speckles across the smudged lenses of his glasses.

“Look at you,” Eddie grumbles. His heart is still beating too fast, scary fast, but he knows better. He knows there’s nothing wrong with him, nothing for Mommy to try and fix, but rather, something right. He reaches, still muttering under his breath, and he takes Richie’s glasses off his face. This is their first time together. Richie’s breathing like he just finished running, full-on sprint, chased, down, down, down into the Barrens, an asshole like Hockstetter still alive and at his heels.

“Would you sit down before you hyperventilate. Jesus Christ, I thought you said you'd done this before,” Eddie says, snappish.

Richie, for once, doesn’t say anything. For once, he does as he is told—he sits. His body crumples down onto the dirty floor of what once passed as the parlor in the Neibolt house. When Eddie looks over at Richie, his face is different. Absent of his glasses, everything about him is clear. Blood is smeared along his jaw. It makes Eddie want to touch his face, touch that filthy spot, either wipe it clean or leave a stain behind, a mark, of his own. The only part of Richie’s face that is clean are the square outlines around his eyes. His eyes are dark and bottomless, no warmth to them, as his mouth stretches into a barbed grin. He finally looks up at Eddie.

“It just never felt that fucking good,” he says.

x.

“We could kill your mom.”

“Fuck off.”

“Hasta la vista! Ciao! Sayonara, Mrs. K!”

“Fuck off,” Eddie says again, mumbled this time.

Richie bumps his bare knee against Eddie’s. “I’d do it for you.”

The rain has finally quit but the day’s shot, the sun will set soon. Moisture sits heavy in the air, Eddie’s clothes damp with it and sweat. He lounges back alongside Richie in the tall wet grass, their bikes abandoned back by the muddy trail. He doesn’t know how to explain to him that no one can do that. No one touches what’s his. Besides, Mommy made him into what he is now. She made him into the boy Richie isn’t supposed to want. You can't kill her for that. 

There’s a red glow out past the trees as the sun begins to dip. There’s a lot of things they talk about, a lot of shit they talk, but they never talk about the first time they knew what each other was. A hunter met with another rather than game. And here’s Richie now, ready to leave a corpse at his feet like a dog, muzzle wet with gore and roadkill, like that's the only way he knows how, like that's some kind of gesture of love.

Eddie turns his head. He’s met with Richie’s expectant face. “Nah,” Eddie says. “We’ll choose the next one together.”


End file.
